


As The Wind Behaves

by Kieron_ODuibhir



Series: Cirque de Triomphe [18]
Category: Batman (Comics), Batman - All Media Types, DCU
Genre: (just at the end though), (most of this is strawman's origin story), AO3 didn't believe there was scarecrow and two-face friendship fic, Alternate Universe - Heroes, Books, Courage, Earth-3, Fear, Gen, Grandmothers, Growing Up, Literary References & Allusions, Mirror Universe, Religion, The Hollow Men, all the Scarecrow tropes basically, and related bits of the holocaust, biomedical ethics, discussion of josef mengele, jon crane is a massive dork and this is good, neuroscience, ontology, vis-a-vis the nature of evil
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-11-25
Updated: 2015-12-06
Packaged: 2018-05-02 03:49:07
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 9
Words: 8,242
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5232824
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Kieron_ODuibhir/pseuds/Kieron_ODuibhir
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p><em>"Concern for the interests of the subject must always prevail over the interests of science and society."</em><br/>-Declaration of Helsinki, World Medical Association on human research ethics, 1975 revision.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. a penny for the old Guy!

**Author's Note:**

> Jon is the only member of the Circus I've followed up from childhood instead of filling it in behind their adult selves. That said, it is not as long as nine chapters makes it look; some of them are really short.
> 
> (Please be aware that while there is no graphic anything, the inhumane experimentation at Auschwitz and the people involved in it are used as an exemplar of evil science, so if thinking about the Holocaust is a problem for you, exercise caution.)

Many people thought, when they met Jonathan Crane, that he was a kind man.

They were wrong. He was shy, though less excruciatingly so as he grew up, and he was on the whole gentle, with restrained manners and most of the time (at least when he took his nose out of his books enough to pay attention), an intense humming _awareness_ of other people’s intentions and expectations that allowed him to be remarkably considerate with minimal effort. He never failed to notice when a classmate or colleague was nervous, and had always been a good tutor, though he lacked the patience to be the best.

He knew all of this about himself, and he knew, also, that he was not really kind.

“No biologist working on anything with a central nervous system can _afford_ to be too nice,” he’d told his lab partner third year of undergrad, near the end of the semester, when they’d gotten all the data they could from the mice they’d raised on three different types of potentially neurotoxic chemicals, and it was time to start the biopsies of their little brains.

One of their classmates had bowed out, unable to face killing something she’d seen born even if she _had_ been steadily poisoning it for months, and another had given up halfway through, his hands shaking. Jonathan looked across the lab at the second student, whose face had turned the color of cheese, and observed, “We’ve all got a little bit of Mengele in us.”

“ _Jesus fuck,_ Crane,” said his lab partner, who was also his friend, and whose latex gloves were covered in mouse blood. “Don’t _say_ things like that.”

Jonathan usually tried not to. The only reason he hadn’t been shunned as a child for all the creepy things he said was that he’d generally been too tongue-tied around other people to say _anything_ , and even so he’d managed to worry his father enough to be taken to a series of child psychologists, which was actually how he had first developed an interest in neurology. At six, he had considered Doctor Bleek, who had a color-coded exploded diagram of the human brain on his office wall, to be his greatest friend, and chattered happily with the man for two hours a week, drinking up answers to all the questions his father and teachers couldn’t or wouldn’t take the time to deal with, even if he got up the nerve to ask them.

(Those visits stopped after Father died, and not just because of the money. Gran didn’t approve of head-doctors, but she did approve of good, marketable hard-science degrees, and once he’d finished undergrad he didn’t actually _need_ her approval anymore because a good bio grad student didn’t pay tuition, he worked his butt off and got a _stipend_ from the institution.)

Learning to read had been like a magic spell, because it allowed him to look for the answers to questions _without having to ask anybody,_ or face the possibility of rejection. It had been a comfort, in the months after he’d gone to live with his grandmother, because reading was something both of them considered ‘useful,’ and that meant he could tuck himself up in the window seat and puzzle at difficult words for _hours_ without having to talk, or think about anything that hurt.

And it had been like magic, too, a different kind, the warping of his world as he came to realize by reading that some of his unanswered questions had remained that way not because no one could be bothered to explain the answers to him, but because there _were no answers to be had_.

At least, no definite ones. At least, not yet. Lots of people had _come up_ with answers to a lot of them, but by the time Jonathan was eleven he had conceived a deep suspicion for all those ideas proclaimed with the greatest certainty, because certainty often seemed to be _all_ they had. Gran was entirely invested in the pseudo-Cartesian dualist perspective of her church, which was completely unsatisfying on several levels.

“Because,” little Jonathan had said, “if our feelings came from the soul, then how would brain injuries and chemicals change them?”

He’d gotten two weeks of grounding for that, but it was worth it to see Gran’s mouth pinch into that frustrated line she got when she didn’t have a good answer.

And it was worth it to _know_ it had been worth it, that he had broken the rules and stood up for his ideas and _nothing terrible had happened_. Just two weeks of being grounded, and five whacks with a hairbrush. He never even went anywhere anyway. The boys at school hit harder than that. The way Gran’s nostrils flared white when she got mad stopped being _quite_ so terrifying, after that.

Jonathan was a coward. He knew it, his schoolmates knew it, his gran knew it and his father had known. _Be brave, son,_ Dad had said wearily, when Jonathan came clinging to him with another fear, another concern, with nightmares and monsters and the hundred and one things on the news that could kill you.

Hadn’t Jonathan _told_ his father to drive carefully? Maybe nobody listened to a second grader telling them how to drive, maybe it wouldn’t have mattered how careful Mr. Crane was being when that truck spun out on the interstate, but _hadn’t he?_

Be brave, son, but he didn’t know how, not when there were a million terrible things in the world and he could see the horrible ends down every path. How did you stop being afraid? He knew what fear was _for,_ as a survival mechanism, knew a little about how it worked, about adrenaline responses and biofeedback and. Philosophy, neurochemistry. He read and read. But none of that helped when his mouth went dry and his throat closed and he couldn’t move.

When he tried to solve the lunch-money problem by packing himself lunches, and then by packing himself lunches no one would want to steal, asparagus and granola, and then giving up on lunch entirely as a meal.

When he wanted to go up to pretty, confident Ginger and say—something, something clever and funny and not creepy, not ask her out or anything, just…make her notice him. Make her smile. At him.

Or when there were seven of Conally’s gang and one confused-looking freshman with a black eye already starting, and he couldn’t make himself say anything, or walk out there, not when he knew about the knives they’d bring out if you made them really mad. (That cowardice hurt so much for so long, left him awake in bed with his stomach cramping up so many nights running that he swore to himself he’d throw himself in the way of the violent crazy people next time, just out of fear of the _guilt_. This resolution was never put to the test, and he always wondered if he could really have done it.)

Conally didn't matter, none of them mattered; Jonathan made a determined effort to ignore who it was who took his lunch or ripped up his homework, because he'd realized watching them that _that was what they wanted._ They wanted to be the most important thing in their victims' worlds. They wanted to be  _important_ , because they weren't important, they were  _nothing._ Plotting revenge was letting them win. And he knew he wasn't _being brave, son_ when he avoided confrontation, but his thoughts belonged to him. He wasn't letting them be hijacked for anybody's ego trip, even if it meant skulking in and out of school and not eating lunch.

The bravest Jonathan ever got was learning to argue back with Gran, and raising his hand in class. _You should apply for these scholarships,_ his AP Chem teacher said. He almost didn’t, too afraid of rejection, too afraid of hoping too big. So maybe submitting all those forms was the actual bravest he ever got.

But really, he was just more scared of a future where he didn’t get to go to college and learn more and get a job that was actually interesting, than he was of filling out paperwork that claimed he was worth an institution’s while.

The one thing he didn’t let himself be scared of was facing new ideas. No matter how strange they were or how intimidating, or how much he had to work to get enough information to decide whether a theory was good or bad; assertion or hypothesis valid or invalid.

He could face that he was a coward, and a lanky, painfully-thin coatrack of a boy and then a man, shy and plain and boring. That girls looked right through him, and he had no close friends—barely any at all, really. That his parents were dead, and had left him almost nothing in the way of legacy. He didn’t have much, but he had his intellectual integrity.

His Gran had come back, before long, with answers to rebut his brain-versus-soul question, theological justifications and hair-splitting definitions that even (especially) at twelve _frustrated_ him, because science changed all the time but that was because people learned new things, and when religion adapted to science it never had to prove its own assertions and it wasn’t _fair._

But she hadn’t made up an answer on the spot. That was important. She’d gone, and asked her pastor, and done her reading, and _thought_ about it. Because she wasn’t _lying,_ not on purpose. She wanted the truth, just like he did. She just thought she already knew what it was. (And when it was that children should always mind their elders it seemed _awfully convenient for her_ , but that still didn’t mean she was lying. She just had _biases in her reasoning_.)

He devoured Asimov’s entire canon when he was thirteen, reread _I, Robot_ for all the little logic puzzles. Focused especially on the QT-1 unit that independently came to the conclusion that it was in fact the ordained prophet of a god that was actually the space station it had been built to run. In outlining the situation one of the characters explained to the other, _you can prove_ anything _by cold, logical reasoning, so long as you pick the right postulates._

And they couldn’t hack the postulates. Those came from the choice to believe. They could have wiped the robotic brain, ‘killed’ the entity inside—maybe. Unless it caught them trying, and killed them. In the end, they left it to its religion, interpreting its god’s will through the dials and gauges in the control center, and thereby fulfilling its intended function.

Jonathan didn’t think that had necessarily been the right choice. If the sensors ever broke down, QT-1 would trust them over any evidence to the contrary. That could go really, really wrong. Though at least there was no one alive on the station to get hurt.

So the lesson Jonathan took was that before you chose to believe something, made it an initial postulate and founded your logic on it, you had _better make sure_ there was nothing wrong with it.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Jonathan Crane's outrageously abusive grandmother was retconned in in 2005 and in my opinion badly missed the point of the character on multiple levels, so I've kind of used her but changed everything else about the family structure and scaled her way back. Not because I don't think it's plausible for someone abused on that level to become a superhero, but because his supervillainy being so clearly a direct result of his abuse was terrible writing that stigmatized abuse victims and drew attention away from his preexisting villainy psych structure, which despite being an ad hoc development over several decades centered around an entitlement/persecution complex similar to the one that underlies a lot of spree shooters, and was vastly more interesting and socially relevant.


	2. there the stone images are raised

_Act in such a way that you treat humanity, whether in your own person or in the person of another, always at the same time as an end and never simply as a means._ Kant. The categorical imperative.

There had been hundreds of doctors at Auschwitz. Some of them were prisoners, conscripted out of the work camps for their expertise and paid in relative safety for their work, for keeping their fellows alive until they were scheduled to be killed—for drawing up the weekly lists of those too sick to bother treating any longer—for _standing by,_ although there was nothing they could possibly have done. But just as many of those serving there were full citizens, Army doctors, employees. Party members.

Researchers, even.

The officer in charge of overseeing all ostensibly-medical matters at Auschwitz was not the infamous Mengele. He was a kinder man, more human, less comprehensible. The sort of man whom prisoner and Nazi doctors alike begged not to transfer away trying to escape responsibility for horror, because anyone else Hitler sent would care so much less, be so much worse. Who spent genuine warmth playing with children whose death warrants he would grudgingly sign.

He hated Auschwitz, as far as anyone could tell, hated it and believed in it and meticulously kept it running. And cut the cervixes out of hundreds of women in the name of cancer research.

There were so many of them, once you started reading. Loyal citizens, with soft hearts and open hands, who in better times might have managed to be good.

But who had not been strong enough to manage it, in the times they had lived in. Not brave enough to throw everything away, to risk betraying their families to traitors’ deaths and themselves either to that or to fleeing among the cutthroat desperate partisans, for the sake of other people’s human rights. Not brave enough, or not certain enough, to stand against neighbors who took a positive joy in the bright future promised by _racial hygiene._ Not trusting enough to believe their friends and family would help them to subvert the law and keep the secret, or else _so_ trusting they believed it when they were told this inhumanity was the only route to survival, was necessity, was _justice_.

(Evil was, perhaps, good people listening to lies. Good people who believed that virtue was obedience. _Behold,_ said the Moses of his grandmother’s Bible, _these caused the children of Israel, through the counsel of Balaam, to commit trespass against the LORD in the matter of Peor, and there was a plague among the congregation of the LORD. Now therefore kill every male among the little ones, and kill every woman that hath known man by lying with him. But all the women children, that have not known a man by lying with him, keep alive for yourselves._

If it had been righteous even once, who was to say it could not be again, hm? _Who was to say?_ )

There was controversy in the medical community, nowadays, about using Nazi data, from those evil labs. In the fifties and sixties, nobody thought twice about it. They just used it. It was just information. But now they were saying that was disrespectful to the dead.

Jonathan knew that he was a coward, and that he was not really kind. He wanted to go into medical science. What if it had been him, back then?

Mengele never paid for his wrongs. Others did, at least a little. (Mengele’s commander, who did not do history the grace of being a monster, hanged himself in custody in 1945, before he could be convicted of anything.) But you cannot prosecute a whole country—a nation, maybe, as a unit, but the last time that had been done to Germany it had had a negative impact on all the neighbors, so hesitation ensued—and so most of the Nazi doctors went home. Lived. Worked. Jonathan had read a few of their interviews.

There were some among them who did not feel guilty. Who had been at the heart of one of the modern age’s most famous evils, calling themselves doctors, and felt no shame.

 _If we believe that the evil man will wear horns, we will not know an evil man,_ he read. The world was not a children’s cartoon. You could not rely on evil to announce itself, to intentionally draw opposition, to even know that it was wrong. You had to be able to figure it out for yourself.

Somehow. Somehow, you had to figure it out for yourself.

At seventeen, Jonathan drew his knobbly knees up under his chin in the night and envied his grandmother her certainties.

In the light of day, he fixed his mind on problems that had solutions, on the nature of fear rather than the nature of evil. Fear happened in the brain, after all. No matter how profound and world-encompassing the emotion seemed, it was reducible. It was controllable. Evil was not. Evil was a matter of philosophy, and philosophy might not be _useless_ , but all by itself, detached from reality, it was just—sophistry. Not science. Not even really reason.

It was appealing to think of himself as a mind that was merely trapped in the circumstance of inhabiting a body. But the mind was the brain, which for all its uniqueness was a physical organ. And really, even the brain itself was only the central node of a network running throughout the body, a fragile messenger system of chemicals and electricity. Somehow adding up to a self.

He wanted to be a scientist. He wanted to ask questions, wanted to tease apart the brain until he had mapped out in it all the things people attributed to the heart and soul, not because they didn’t matter but because they _did._ Because if something was important you should do your best to understand it.

All he had ever wanted was to understand.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Biblical material quoted is from the Book of Numbers. Auschwitz sources include _The Banality of Evil_ , _Murderous Medicine_ , and _The Nazi Doctors_.


	3. crossed, with direct eyes

When Jonathan was twenty-seven, he achieved tenure-track at Gotham University. He was required to teach only one undergraduate lecture per semester, and take on two seminars and a trio of grad students. (Public speaking, fortunately, was only counted among his many terrors when he didn’t know what he was talking about.) He still had to serve as an academic advisor, but he got a little more choice, instead of just being presented with an undifferentiated lump of incoming freshmen.

He still wasn’t the best teacher, but he was a long way from the worst. He still noticed, when his students were upset. None of _his_ advisees ever got so desperate, locked into spirals in their heads, that they hurt themselves. Not that he was about to gloat about that to people whose kids _had._ Maybe he’d just been lucky, after all.

He additionally held a part-time position with Arkham Asylum, mostly serving as a consultant to other doctors on the latest neurological advances and helping with detailed specifications of the latest antipsychotics, but occasionally working with patients directly. His publications in the field of phobia treatment were well-received, and he was widely respected for his understanding of neurochemistry, especially in relation to stress conditions. And if the grant money never flowed like water, neither was it often like getting blood from a stone.

This was the life he had worked for.

This was everything he had wanted.

Jonathan Crane was content.

His Gran disapproved of half a dozen things about his way of life, but he _was_ successful and respectable, and he still came home to visit every year or two, and she still baked apple turnovers when he did. They mostly avoided topics of dissension with the ease of long practice, and if Jonathan could never be entirely relaxed around her, he didn’t hate her, either. When G. Gordon Godfrey, the controversial atheist columnist, scheduled a televised debate with Ken Ham, Jonathan recklessly suggested they watch it together.

It didn’t even go badly. Jonathan didn’t laugh as much as he would’ve watching it on his own, but Gran didn’t get defensive so much as disgusted with _both_ parties—Godfrey for being wrong and making tacky puns about his own name, and Ham for being stupid and having bad theology—and they shook their heads over straw-man arguments and parted without bad blood, full of turnovers and milk.

A month later, Gran died in her sleep. Jonathan found himself wishing he had been less dismissive of life after death, when talking to a woman who had been old when he was born. He made sure the service was just the way she’d wanted it—she’d written up detailed instructions in her will—and sat through her pastor’s sermon thinking about comforting lies, about truth and knowledge, and the terror of uncertainty, and how rarely he had ever seen his grandmother smile.

Psychiatrists made the worst patients, but he signed up for grief counseling anyway. Caught himself taking detailed notes on his own emotional state because he hadn’t been bereaved since he was six and it was very different, as an adult.

Gran would have sneered at him. He didn’t resent that so much, anymore.

He’d barely seen her a dozen times since he’d finished undergrad. It was strange, how much you could miss someone who’d barely been part of your life.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I think the insane 2005 great-grandmother, Mrs. Keeney, was either a really stuffy Southern Baptist or an Episcopalian, though visual details suggested she was from a very well-off long-established Catholic family in rural Georgia, which...isn't really a thing? Not impossible, just weird. But it's hard to tell High Church Episcopalians from Catholics at a glance. But anyway I made her a Baptist because reasons, not that it shows much.
> 
> Ken Ham is a fundamentalist and a biblical literalist, which means that his theology is close to that of many Baptist denominations (Baptists are late-stage Protestants and in theory very much about individual spiritual determination, though in practice deference to the judgment of pastor and community is usually expected) but messier and more ductile than the more structured sub-sects.
> 
> ^^ Atheist columnist G. Gordon Godfrey makes me happy.


	4. between the essence and the descent

He was thirty-five when the fateful research proposal arrived on his desk.

It wasn’t often he had research proposed _to_ him, and only once had a proposal arrived like this, wrapped up with a juicy grant in a metaphorical bow. ( _That_ proposal, which had been clearly based on Jonathan’s published work and read like a wish list, had led to the development of an inhalable that could suppress panic attacks, allowing phobias and anxieties to be confronted and overcome at greater speed with less suffering. The underwriting corporation had tried to lure Jonathan to the University of Metropolis for the project, but he had tenure here, and for all Gotham’s shortcomings it suited him better than the bright, slick young city in its gentler climate, closer to the hometown he’d been so set on escaping.)

This one, though. It was, technically, based on his research—his current track, in fact. A lot of his previous work came together in his recent interest in developing pharmaceuticals that could induce the stress states he wanted to study—partly because if the drugs worked it would prove some of his inferences, and partly because he would much rather drug a rabbit terrified than torture it that way, even if the rabbit would only perceive minimal benefit from the difference.

Jonathan read through the packet, then read through it again, sifting between the lines, hoping he had misunderstood. Trying to find some other word than his grandmother’s to express what he’d found there.

Heresy and blasphemy were both within his purview. Code and convention were nothing before truth. But this…this was heresy against _science_ , against those few things he had cobbled together to believe in, his island in the terrifying abyss, and he could not let it stand. Would have felt compelled to speak out against anyone else taking this path.

He said no. Sent the proposal back with a list of the dozen reasons those compounds were not prepared for human trials, _especially_ such intense ones, _most especially_ _not_ on anyone who was not a free volunteer. He cited the Geneva Convention, although it did not technically apply because Arkham’s inmates weren’t prisoners of war. They weren’t even technically penal prisoners of the state, most of them; they were people committed by their families because they just weren’t safe outside of an institutional setting, and people remitted by the law for the same reason, often because they were not fit to stand trial or because their trials had found them not guilty by reason of insanity.

They were, in short, while very fascinating subjects, not actually suitable for research into the normal human brain _anyway._

The proposal came back, most of the dozen reasons either ignored or dismissed. The Geneva Convention was apparently deemed irrelevant, but the revised proposal did include a measure for recruiting some subjects from Blackgate Penitentiary. For more neurotypical sample reactions.

Jonathan said no again. (If the science had been ready for this step he might have found this a little less easy, but he had a lot of refining to do before he was ready to start petitioning to work with primates, let alone humans. You couldn’t rush good research. Even less could you rush _potentially evil research._ Even for the sake of not having to write your own grant proposals anymore.)

He went to his Head of Department afterward, knowing that he hadn’t seen the end of the subject. She was strained and sympathetic and strangely noncommittal.

A week later, when the proposal came back, Doctor Mistlethwaite came with it, and so did a representative from Wayne Industries. The discussion was very polite and formal and academic-sounding, but the eventual message was entirely plain: Gotham U and WE were embarking on this research program, in conjunction with Arkham. With him or without him.

With him, it was strongly intimated, would be preferred, and in light of his concerns he should be _particularly_ anxious to be involved, and see that nothing went too far. That made a sort of sense, but only until Jonathan looked at it carefully, and at the flat glinting eyes of the corporate rep, and knew how little control he’d _really_ have. How little power to stop the torture.

The next few weeks were a torture in their own right, paperwork and petitions and stalling and runaround. He knew he was losing even when he started. He could have stood against Corporate America with the institution behind him, or against the academic administration if they hadn’t been impelled on their course by a company that owned the state government very nearly outright.

He could denounce Gotham U’s research to the community at large, but it wasn’t as if they were planning to _hide_ what they were doing. Just package and present it in a way that sounded less horrifying. (And it _was_ horrifying, and it _was_ wrong, and he was determined to hold onto that initial moral conviction no matter how many people dismissed it. Even if he withered to dust inside when he caught a scornful, jaded look that reduced him to a whining toddler afraid of monsters in the closet, and it took him several seconds to remember how to speak.)

The plan had gotten past the review board, somehow. Wayne money, Jonathan was afraid.

(Jonathan was very afraid.)

 _Required is the voluntary, informed, understanding consent of the human subject in a full legal capacity._ Nuremburg Code, 1947.

 _Concern for the interests of the subject must always prevail over the interests of science and society_. Declaration of Helsinki, 1975.

Arkham inmates were mentally incompetent. Their doctors were, in some cases, empowered to give consent on their behalf. This was, technically, permissible under the law. So long as the procedures were putatively for their benefit.

Something was rotten. And beginning to reek.

(Jonathan had never liked being angry. Anger clotted in his stomach and made him feel sick, and sometimes it made his hands shake. The physiological symptoms were so like fear that the adrenaline usually drove him to be frightened, too, and he always got embarrassed with himself for being overemotional and losing control. There was nothing to be gained by getting angry.)

Jonathan had one last conversation with Doctor Mistlethwaite (or _Beth_ , as most of the faculty called her in informal contexts), in which he appealed to scientific integrity and a lot of other highflown ideals and came close to raising his voice. It was no use. The trials commenced tomorrow at eleven AM. Her hands, she proclaimed, were tied.

Jonathan said he understood. Then he went back to his own office, and thought about truth, and knowledge, and success, and sacrifice. About that little bit of Mengele, and how much you could afford to feed it before it began to define you.

In the morning he, and everything they would have needed to go ahead with their testing program, were gone.


	5. crowskin, crossed staves in a field

He got away clean. Taking with him one copy of everything that would have been necessary to press forward with systematically torturing prisoners with his work, and burning the rest. (His books, he left behind.) The problem was, his plan ended there. With getting away. He didn’t actually have anywhere to _go._

If Gran had still been alive, he would probably have dragged himself to her door. In the dead of night, of course. Because that was the first place they’d look for him. Not that he was entirely clear who ‘they’ were, and whether he’d broken any laws—not that _not_ having broken any laws would protect him from arrest. Come on. He might be an ivory-tower academic, but even he knew. This was Gotham.

This was Gotham, which was why he should have known that maybe he should guard his tongue with strangers in bars. But he’d been hiding out in a motel growing increasingly twitchy for three days by then, trying to figure out where to go from here.

Gran would have supported him, he was pretty sure. Not about some things—he knew her iron moral code; if he’d asked her to hide him because he’d killed someone she’d have turned him over in a Metropolis second, but she’d never have turned on him just because she might get in _trouble,_ not if his cause had been righteous. She’d been a profoundly courageous woman, in her own way. Jonathan could have gone to her with this.

Depressingly enough, there was no one alive he could say that about. Most of his small number of friends would share his outrage over the abuse of scientific ethics, but he was going to be blackballed so hard for this if he was _lucky_ , and even if he’d completely 100% trusted any of them to be willing to risk going down with his moral ship, did he really _want_ to inflict that on them? No. So that left him with no one to turn to, and nowhere to go. And no ideas for employment, since the pharmaceutical industry would undoubtedly hand him over to Wayne, let alone any way to keep doing what he loved best.

(He’d loved his job. He’d loved his job _so much,_ had worked so hard to be able to have exactly that job. What was he _doing?_ There had to have been some other way, some other channel he could have gone through to stop the human trials going forward. He should have thought harder, before he resorted to such drastic measures.

And at the same time, he couldn’t stop the little voice at the back of his head saying that if he was _truly_ dedicated to this, he would have burned _all_ his notes, everything he’d dedicated his life to discovering. But he knew that if he did that, it would be only as his very last act before immolating _himself_. Even if most of it, his research track up until the last few years, was already documented in journals, some of it already in regular clinical use, and it wouldn’t really be his _whole_ self he was destroying. Even so. There were some lines that a man couldn’t cross, and he had them for self-sacrifice as well as cruelty.)

He’d been lonely, and depressed, and terrified, and talking to another morose midnight drinker had been _so much_ of a relief from staring into the depths of a horrible tequila (chosen in hopes that the unpleasantness of drinking it would keep him from having too much) and contemplating his life choices, and lack thereof going forward.

And he hadn’t really thought about how there might be reasons other than potential Wayne Industries corporate repo men to not tell people he was a PhD/MD neurochemist with a focus in experimental pharmacology. Especially not people who _also_ knew he had no one waiting for him at home and wasn’t expected back at work.

Not until he woke up with his head in a bag, lungs heavy with the scent of chloroform, hands and feet tied to a steel chair.


	6. wind in dry grass

He’d broken fairly easy. He admitted it. In some ways, the bag had helped him bear up; the terror of the unknown was really no worse than the terror of the known, because after all he could frame so many possible bad ends from full knowledge but when he _didn’t_ know, the possibility existed of things being considerably _less_ dire than he in his ignorance assumed.

After they’d ripped it off, he had seen the absolute lack of any human sympathy in their eyes, looked down through the oncoming interview like the moves of a chess game, and known that the only two ends were his capitulation or his death. There was no possibility of rescue. Dragging his heels would just make the process of getting to one outcome or the other all the more unpleasant and scarring.

He hadn’t been ready to die.

Jonathan Crane was a coward. It was nothing he hadn’t known.


	7. or rats' feet over broken glass

He’d never pictured a career in designer drugs.

That was the interesting thing about the stuff they had him make, though: it was all so new, so experimental, that it _wasn’t actually illegal yet_ , which meant less here in Gotham than in some cities, but still not nothing. They were always pushing him to put together something new, new, new, and the horrible lab they gave him didn’t have much scope, but he found himself doing his best. Not too new, though. Nothing he didn’t know what it did.

They were a bunch of small-timers, he realized fairly quickly. Grabbing him had been merely the latest in a string of attempts to break into the big leagues. Not that that made any difference, really. If there were any weaknesses in their system of imprisonment, he hadn’t been able to find them, and as long as he was in their building it didn’t matter how large or small their power was outside of it. Especially since he was a fugitive from, if not the law, at least Authority in some of its forms.

So here he was. Held captive, mixing up mind-bending poisons against his will. But mixing.

He asked himself what it had been worth, his moral high ground. If all it had gotten him was the slight salve to the conscience offered a prisoner-doctor. He still hadn’t escaped Mengele’s shadow completely, and now he had less freedom to act than ever. What had it been worth, if this was all.

If it had been worth losing everything for.

If it would be worth dying for.

He didn’t think it would. He was _tired._ Tired of making sacrifices that no one had asked of him, that probably didn’t even help anyone. His life was _all he had left._ This wasn’t Nazi Germany. No one was _making_ people buy the little pills. No one was _making_ the dealers sell them. The only person being forced here was him. Surely that counted for something?

But then he found out people _were_ being forced. Not to buy, but to imbibe. By stealth, sometimes by actual force. The sedatives and hypnotics were being used for kidnappings and rapes. At least twice, the psychedelic mixture he had so carefully manipulated to be as harmless as possible had been used to make people so vulnerable they could be nudged into strolling into accidental deaths, thus avoiding any risk of a murder investigation.

And once again, he had to sit down—not in his familiar office this time, no, on a grimy folding chair in the corner of his shadowed attic workspace—and make a decision.

It was easier this time, really. He had so much less left to lose.


	8. headpiece filled with straw

Seven months after his kidnapping, he was staring into a glass of liquor again. Not tequila—he was never touching tequila again; it was now a, not a friend, an _unpleasant acquaintance_ who had betrayed him.

Rum. Something he liked only slightly better.

Heavy footfalls entered the room—not the claw-clicking but otherwise near-silent tread of the metahuman who’d been introduced to him as Crocodile Dundee (which in retrospect had probably been intended as humor but he’d been _far_ too emotionally wrung-out to register the possibility and now didn’t know what to call the person) but the solid step of the tall, scarred man he was pretty sure was the DA who’d been attacked with acid in court several years ago. He couldn’t remember that name, either.

Whatever his name was, he was a big man and he moved like he was even bigger, and Jonathan had to fight not to cringe and curl up as he approached. Every craven, pathetic prey-creature instinct he’d developed over a childhood of bullying had reasserted itself and gained new monstrous strength over the course of his time as a mob chemist. He wanted to move so that when he got hit, it would only land somewhere unimportant like his back or his legs.

He held completely still.

The ex-lawyer came up behind his shoulder and stopped. Snorted. Reached over Jonathan’s shoulder to grab his glass.

“Excuse me,” Jonathan made himself say. Very levelly. Because he wasn’t going to start giving in to threats that hadn’t even been _voiced._ The kid who’d given up on lunch was a long time ago. “That’s mine.”

“And you’re not a rum man,” the acid-melted vigilante stated. Janus, that was what they’d called him during the raid, when Jonathan’s carefully rigged explosions had been going off early and the whole crazy three-ring circus of them had burst in. “I thought so when I saw you taking the bottle, and now you’ve been in here most of an hour and you’ve drunk about two fingers.” Janus knocked the rest of the little round liquor glass back, and raised his eyebrows when Jonathan twisted around to stare at him. “Am I wrong?”

“Maybe I’m just a slow drinker,” Jonathan said.

He was. The _theory_ of drinking his sorrows away appealed to him, numbing away the spin of neural activity with a strong but mild depressant _just_ psychoactive enough to have a reliable effect without much longterm impact on neurotransmitter saturation or uptake, unless systematically abused over a fairly long period. Alcohol was a good, simple, _reliable_ drug. Which had its own risks, but they were ones he considered himself utterly equal to managing, and there were so few of those in the world that even the _risks_ of drinking acquired a certain reassuring quality.

In practice, the thoughts he was trying to slow tended to billow up and distract him from the self-medicating part.

“Hm,” said Janus, noncommittally. “Whatever kind of drinker you are, you don’t need to punish yourself with that battery acid.”

Jonathan’s ribs heaved with a breathy, bitter little laugh. “Believe me, if I were out to punish myself, we wouldn’t be looking at a few sips of hundred-fifty proof rum.”

“ _Terrible_ one-fifty rum,” Janus countered, but his strange unbalanced face twisted with an expression sort of like sympathy, and he held up an amber bottle. “All the same, I thought you might like some bourbon. And…some company.”

There was something about the way he said it—not obviously uncomfortable, but sort of tentative, at odds with the forceful way he moved and made pronouncements, and appropriated other people’s alcohol. Something that made Jonathan say, “Thank you,” and reach out for the whiskey.


	9. sunlight on a broken column

The scarred man’s name turned out to be Harvey Dent, which was familiar once he said it, from back when he’d been a political figure and his name had come up all around the city in the course of campaign season. The crocodile meta was Waylon Jones, he reported, with a grin at the Crocodile Dundee thing that didn’t seem to be at Jonathan’s expense. He sketched out the rest of their group in small, fairly impersonal descriptors and names, and it took Jonathan a while (and a second filling of the clean glass Dent had brought with him; he’d kept Jonathan’s original one and that was almost definitely an attempt to be belatedly polite rather than a sneaky way to drug him) to realize that this was information that counted as secret. That this vigilante conspiracy couldn’t possibly be in the habit of telling just anyone what was under their masks and printed on their birth certificates.

“And what’s his real name?” Jonathan asked idly, after Dent had shared his personal perspective on the Jokester. No one in Gotham _didn’t_ know the mad clown by reputation already, but hearing him described from the point of view of a close friend was almost enough to get his psychiatric impulses piqued again.

“He doesn’t have one.” Janus had hesitated half a beat before saying it, analyzing Jonathan’s posture and tone and possible reasons for asking in one quick slashing look that dismissed all pretense at idle curiosity.

“You aren’t under any obligation to tell me,” Jonathan said, running his forefinger along the far rim of his glass. Though he felt oddly disappointed. He had only asked one question, but of course that had been the one thing they didn’t want him to know.

“He really doesn’t.” Dent set his glass down, _thunk_ , motion firm and purposeful like almost every move he’d made since they’d met, and it was interesting from a behavioral-psych perspective that this man _wasn’t_ the leader. He had a distinct air of command. And the redheaded woman and the man in the hat seemed like they would object to being told what to do, on principle. What was it about the Jokester that let him corral these people. “I’m not hiding anything,” Dent said. “Nobody knows who he used to be.”

Jonathan looked up, curve of glass cool but not cold against his fingers. The scarred, maskless face of the vigilante looked back at him, unruffled. He didn’t know if he believed that, wondered again about the power dynamic that could let the clown keep his privacy when no one else did, but that lack of mask could not be denied. “Why _aren’t_ you? Hiding anything.”

“We want you to trust us,” was the answer, frank and mild and completely inadequate to explain the danger he’d put himself and his allies in by betraying all their disguises. Before Jonathan could decide whether to say anything to that effect, Dent added, “We already know who you are, after all.”

He felt his breath quicken, rat in a trap. He hadn’t given his name. No one had asked. He still had his briefcase with all his papers. “You do?”

Dent nodded. “Doctor Jonathan Crane, who disappeared with all his research the night before human testing was supposed to start. Owlman was genuinely livid. There’s been a covert manhunt. _Nobody_ thought you were in town anymore.”

They’d heard. Their masked enemy _was_ behind Wayne’s interest in his work. And, irony of ironies, he’d been thought successfully escaped. “While in reality I was locked up in some drug pushers’ attic.”

“At least it kept you out of sight.” The remark was drier than dry, lilting with irony, but it still drove anger through Jonathan’s teeth.

“It wasn’t worth it,” he said, hand tightening around his cup. Impulsively, he brought the glass up and swallowed everything in it in one gulp. Controlled the impulse to cough as it went down, smoother than the tequila or rum but still burning. _The mind that broods o’er guilty woes, / is like the scorpion girt by fire…_ “‘So writhes the mind remorse hath riven,’” he murmured into his empty cup. “‘Unfit for earth, undoomed for heaven.’”

Dent reached across his field of view to silently pour another finger of bourbon into the bottom of the glass, and it occurred to Jonathan that drink might be loosening his tongue. But what did it matter? He evidently had no secrets besides his compounds, and he wasn’t likely to start explaining extremely advanced neurochemistry to the disfigured lawyer while in his cups, let alone explaining it _comprehensibly_.He just had to make sure he didn’t pass out. (The idea terrified him. He wondered how long it would be before he could close his eyes without the fear of waking up somewhere, blind and bound.)

Though he would need to sleep, sooner or later. He could…put his papers under his head. With his hand over the latch.

They wanted him to trust them. Maybe he would, in time.

“I told myself,” Jonathan said to the glass, “that I shouldn’t feel guilty. They’d sell drugs anyway; all my participation meant was that they weren’t selling unpredictable poison. And because of me they could afford not to cut the stuff with as many dangerous adulterants. That I might even be saving a few lives.” The knot of emotion in his stomach was loosening as he got drunk. He might even be able to eat something and keep it down. “But I didn’t really believe it.”

There were probably a few Nazi scientists still alive today, _even now_ , twenty years after he had first read about them, who didn’t believe they had done anything wrong. Who couldn’t bring themselves to live (or die) with the knowledge of their own guilt.

“Then you’re one ahead of me,” said Janus, and knocked back his cup once again. Set it down with a clunk, louder than the last, which made Jonathan think maybe the alcohol was affecting him enough that he was losing delicate motor control, even if otherwise he seemed fine. “I was District Attorney in this town, once upon a time. And I didn’t think twice about whether I was doing right. I never had any doubts about the establishment; thought of corruption as inevitable and condoning it as the price of doing business.” The deliberate power in the way he moved was becoming more threatening, as he spoke, coiling up like a compressed spring. As though maybe he was always angry, profoundly, and had woven it so deeply into himself that it was invisible until he allowed himself to concentrate on it. If he kept up like this, it seemed likely his glass would break, either from squeezing or because he’d thrown it.

Then he paused, and took a long breath, and the danger melted away. “I…changed,” Dent said. “Obviously. But I had to make a tactical error that got me thrown out of that world before I could look back and realize it was wrong. I could never have been as brave as you, to pick up and walk away when nothing was hurting me, personally.”

Jonathan’s voice just clicked, when he tried to speak, and rather than fight with it he swirled the golden liquid in his cup until he was able to murmur, “The university isn’t _that_ bad, really.” But it must, he admitted, be worse than he ever thought before, for him to have been faced with the choice of taking his research and running, or being complicit with human rights violations in the morning.

He wasn’t brave. Really, he wasn’t. He just knew exactly what he couldn’t bear.

So far as he could tell, none of the Circus had realized yet that he’d had no way out of his own explosions until they appeared. He had stood there, with his briefcase full of precious, worthless papers, and watched the fire spread around him, as though the dancing orange licking at the old Halloween decorations heaped in one corner would be able to tell him _why._

He’d always tried to do the right thing. How had it come to this.

He drank again. And the bourbon really was much less unpleasant than the rum. The sweetness had never concealed the bite. And even though he knew the rum was sweet because molasses had more sugar to begin with than corn did, not by any artifice, the whiskey seemed more honest somehow. “I just ran afoul of greater forces,” he said.

Dent snorted. “Bruce Wayne isn’t as great as all that.”

“Not _him._ Personally. The…overarcing institutional corruption.” Jonathan pursed his lips at the drink remaining in his cup. Left it there for now. He didn’t like how his statement had come out, but he couldn’t think of any better way to word it. It wasn’t _inaccurate_ the way he’d said it, it just didn’t have the right _sound_. This was why he quoted, when he could. He’d read so many evocative works, but when he tried to articulate ideas himself it always came down to clinical precision.

One of his old roommates used to tell him he had no poetry in his soul. The existence of the soul aside, he didn’t think it was true, or he wouldn’t enjoy other people’s. It simply wasn’t the way his brain processed language, that was all.

“Mmm,” Dent hummed agreeably. “A pretty great force, I admit. And yet here we are.”

“And yet,” Jonathan murmured.

“Trying to be decent men, in an indecent time.”

Jonathan thought of Eduard Wirths, too decent to turn away a Jewish patient from his home practice just because it was illegal to treat them, but Nazi enough to refuse to condemn the death camp where he oversaw mass murder. He thought about the bewildered freshman he hadn’t stepped in to help, all those years ago.

He thought about the hard line of his grandmother’s mouth.

“‘To be nobody-but-yourself,’” he quoted softly, “‘in a world that is trying, night and day, to make you everybody else, means to fight the hardest battle which any human being can fight; and never stop fighting.’”

He had nowhere to go. No more home, no more job. If he resurfaced to apply for another position, Wayne would catch up with him, either with lawsuits or assassins. He had nothing left in the world but his principles.

Jonathan finished off the burning liquid in his cup, and turned to Janus, his glass meeting the tabletop with a soft, crisp _tock._ “I’m prepared to fight. Will you help me?”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> The scorpion quote is the best bit of a long dull poem by Lord Byron, and the 'nobody-but-yourself' is e.e.cummings, specifically in the 1958 book _A Poet's Advice_ , i.e. not actually poetry. I like Crane's quoting habit. (And yes, Harvey totally quoted himself from a different universe.)
> 
> Jon actually makes a remarkably good addition to the team at this point--as a biopsych guy who does a lot of lab work, likes literature, overthinks ethics, and doesn't talk that much, he has common ground with literally everybody else in the Circus. Except the toddler.


End file.
